Mother–child joint writing in Chinese kindergarteners: metalinguistic awareness,maternal mediation and literacy acquisition

The present study examined the relations of Chinese word reading and writing to both maternal mediation of writing and a number of metalinguistic and cognitive skills in 63 Hong Kong Chinese kindergarteners. The whole process of maternal mediation of writing, in which mothers individually facilitated their children's writing of 12 two‐character words in their own ways, was videotaped. This study replicated and extended previous work on the cognitive strategies mothers use to help children in writing Chinese words. Mothers' typical mediation strategies were positively and significantly associated with both children's independent word reading and writing. In addition, maternal mediation of writing was uniquely associated with Chinese word reading, but not word writing, even with metalinguistic and cognitive skills, including phonological awareness, morphological awareness, orthographic processing and visual knowledge, statistically controlled. Findings underscore the importance of mothers' early scaffolding in facilitating children's literacy acquisition.     

Patterns of analogical reasoning among beginning readers

Despite compelling evidence that analogy skills are available to beginning readers, few studies have actually explored the possibility of identifying individual differences in young children's analogy skills in early reading. The present study examined individual differences in children's use of orthographic and phonological relations between words as they learn to read. Specifically, the study addressed whether general analogical reasoning, short‐term memory and domain‐specific reading skills explain 5‐ to 6‐year‐olds' reading analogies (n=51). The findings revealed an orthographic analogy effect accompanied by high levels of phonological priming. Single‐word reading and use of visual analogies predicted young children's orthographic and phonological analogies in the regression analyses. However, different findings emerged from exploring profiles based on individual differences in reasoning skill. Indeed, when individual differences in composite scores of orthographic and phonological analogy were examined, group membership was predicted by word reading and early phonological knowledge, rather than general analogical reasoning skills. The findings highlight the usefulness of exploring individual differences in children's analogy development in the early stages of learning to read.     

The role of stroke knowledge in reading and spelling in Chinese

The present study examined the types of orthographic knowledge that are important in learning to read and spell Chinese words in a 2‐year longitudinal study following 289 Hong Kong Chinese children from Grade 1 to Grade 2. Multiple regression results showed that radical knowledge significantly predicted children's word reading and spelling performance across the years. Stroke knowledge contributed both concurrently (Grade 1) and longitudinally (Grade 2) to children's spelling performance after controlling for rapid naming, phonological awareness, morphological awareness and radical knowledge. These findings support the significance of radical knowledge in Chinese reading and spelling and the specific role of stroke order knowledge in Chinese spelling. The findings have implications for the design of an effective curriculum for teaching children to spell Chinese characters.     

Evaluation of a rime-based reading program with Shuswap and Heiltsuk First Nations prereaders

The utility of teaching reading using rime-based readingstrategies with prereaders was examined. Two experiments are presentedthat studied the effects of a rime-based reading program with FirstNations prereaders; one experiment with Shuswap kindergartners andthe other with Heiltsuk Grade 1 children. Rhyming, phoneme identity,letter-sound knowledge, phonological working memory, First Nationslanguage speaking ability, and reading were measured. In the Shuswapgroup, the reading program increased the abilities that werespecifically taught, rhyming, initial phoneme identity, letter-sounds,and word reading by rime-analogy, compared to the control group.Children also developed abilities that were not specifically taught,final phoneme identity and reading by letter recoding, and could use therime-analogy strategy to read words with unfamiliar rime endings.Phonological working memory remained unchanged. The Heiltsuk childrengained in reading compared to a Grade 1 comparison group. Pretestletter-sound knowledge and rhyming were related to later reading butphoneme identity and First Nations language ability were not. Progressin phonological awareness and word reading can be enhanced in prereadersby adding experience with rime-based strategies to the readingprogram.     

The Role of Children's Phonological and Semantic Knowledge in Learning to Read Words

The effect of phonology and semantics on word learning in 5- and 6-year-old children was explored. In Experiment 1, children learned to read words varying in spelling-sound consistency and imageability. Consistency affected performance on early trials, whereas imageability affected performance on later trials. Individual differences among children in phonemic awareness on the trained words were related to learning, and knowledge of a word's meaning predicted how well it was learned. In Experiment 2, phonological and semantic knowledge of nonwords was manipulated prior to word learning. Familiarization with a word's pronunciation facilitated word learning, but there was no additional benefit from being taught to associate a meaning with a nonword.

     

Reading instruction affects the cognitive skills supporting early reading development

This study examined the cognitive skills associated with early reading development when children were taught by different types of instruction. Seventy-nine children (mean age at pre-test 4;10 (.22 S.D.) and post-test 5;03 (.21 S.D.)) were taught to read either by an eclectic approach which included sight-word learning, guessing from context and analytic phonics, or by a synthetic phonics approach, where children were taught solely to sound and blend letters to read unfamiliar words. The results illustrated differences in the skills supporting children's word reading based on their method of reading instruction. For the eclectic group, pre-test letter knowledge, vocabulary and rhyming skills predicted later reading ability, whereas for the synthetic phonics group, letter knowledge, phonemic awareness and memory span predicted later reading skill. The results suggest that children will draw upon different cognitive skills when reading if they are taught to use different word recognition strategies.     

Effects of Home Literacy,Parents' Beliefs,and Children's Task-Focused Behavior on Emergent Literacy and Word Reading Skills

We examined the effects of home literacy (shared book reading, teaching activities, and number of books), children's task-focused behavior, and parents' beliefs and expectations about their child's reading and academic ability on kindergarten children's (N = 61) phonological sensitivity and letter knowledge and on Grade 1 word reading. The results showed that, after controlling for nonverbal IQ and vocabulary, home literacy instruction prior to kindergarten, parents' beliefs about their children's reading ability, and children's task-focused behavior were significant predictors of two or more of the dependent variables. Storybook reading did not account for unique variance in any of the dependent variables.     

How poor readers and spellers use interactive speech in a computerized spelling program

The ‘Spello’ program was designed to use interactive speech feedback on a talking-computer system to improve children's spelling and phonological skills. In two versions of the program, the synthesizer pronounced the word to be spelled and the student tried to type in the word correctly. Both versions of the program showed the students which letters were correct in their spelling attempts. One version pronounced only the target word, as often as the child requested. The other version also provided intermediate speech feedback for children's spelling attempts, so they could hear how their own attempts sounded, and compare them to the target word. Twenty-eight children aged seven to fourteen studied 16 words they had misspelled on pretests and 16 words of related word structure. For children ten years or older, training with intermediate speech feedback led to greater benefits in phonological coding skills than training with word-only feedback, reflected in the ability to read nonsense words related in structure to the trained words. Intermediate speech feedback also led to a marginally significant advantage in spelling the trained words. When the groups switched conditions, however, there was no difference in their tested skills after a second week of training.     

Enhancing the early literacy development of children at risk for reading difficulties

Abstract

This paper reviews the dynamic and interactive links between the development of children's language, phonological awareness, and reading. Some of the key issues explored are procedures to enhance children's language development, decoding and word recognition skills, along with some relevant assessment and programming strategies that can facilitate children's early reading development. In particular, the paper supports the suggestion that deficits in phonological awareness are often a consequence of slow vocabulary development (a classic marker of language delay) and that teachers need to be able to adapt their language and dialogue interactions for children with language delays.     

The role of prosodic sensitivity in children's reading development

While the critical importance of phonological awareness (segmental phonology) to reading ability is well established, the potential role of prosody (suprasegmental phonology) in reading development has only recently been explored. This study examined the relationship between children's prosodic skills and reading ability. Hierarchical multiple regression analyses examined the unique contribution of word‐level and phrase‐level prosodic skills to the prediction of three concurrent measures of reading ability in 81 fourth‐grade children (mean age 9.3 years). After controlling for phonological awareness and general rhythmic sensitivity, children's prosodic skills predicted unique variation in word‐reading accuracy and in reading comprehension. Phrase‐level prosodic skills, assessed by means of a reiterative speech task, predicted unique variance in reading comprehension, after controlling for word reading accuracy, phonological awareness and general rhythmic sensitivity. These results add to the growing body of evidence of the importance of prosodic skills in reading development.     

The nature of phonological awareness throughout the elementary grades: An item response theory perspective

In the present study, the nature of Dutch children's phonological awareness was examined throughout the elementary school grades. Phonological awareness was assessed using five different sets of items that measured rhyming, phoneme identification, phoneme blending, phoneme segmentation, and phoneme deletion. A sample of 1405 children from kindergarten through fourth grade participated. Results of modified parallel analysis and analyses within the context of item response theory (IRT) showed phonological awareness to be unidimensional across different tasks and grades. Despite the evidence for a single underlying ability, the cognitive task requirements for the various tasks were found to differ. In addition to some overlap between the item sets, those for rhyming, phoneme identification, and phoneme blending were easier than those for phoneme segmentation and phoneme deletion. The results lend support to the assumption that phonological awareness is a continuum of availability for phonological representations which can range from partial availability (i.e., access) to full availability (i.e., access).     

Phonological Awareness and Naming Speed in the Prediction of Dutch Children's Word Recognition

Influences of phonological awareness and naming speed on the speed and accuracy of Dutch children's word recognition were investigated in a longitudinal study. The speed and accuracy of word recognition at the ends of Grades 1 and 2 were predicted by naming speed from both the beginning and end of Grade 1, after control for autoregressive relations, kindergarten letter knowledge, and vocabulary knowledge. Phonological awareness at the beginning of Grade 1 predicted only the accuracy of word recognition at the end of Grade 1. No evidence was found for reciprocal influences of word recognition skills on later phonological awareness or naming speed.     

Learning to read Chinese: Semantic,syntactic, phonological and working memory skills in normally achieving and poor Chinese readers

Whereas many studies point to a positive relationship between phonological skills and reading in English, little is known about these relationships for children learning to read in a morphemic orthography such as Chinese. The aim of this study was to examine the relationships among reading ability, phonological, semantic and syntactic skills in Chinese. The participants were 196 grade 1 to grade 4 Chinese children in Hong Kong. A word recognition task in Chinese was developed and children who scored in the lowest quartile were classified as poor readers. The children were administered phonological tasks (tone and rhyming discrimination), semantic tasks (choosing similar words and sentences meanings), a syntactic task (oral cloze), and a working memory task. The results showed that word recognition was highly correlated with phonological skills and semantic processing, and was only moderately related to syntactic knowledge and working memory. Poor readers showed a significant lag in the development of these skills with the most significant problems at the phonological and semantic levels. Phonological skills are important to the acquisition of reading skills in both Chinese and English.     

Changes in letter sound knowledge are associated with development of phonological awareness in pre‐school children

Letter sound knowledge, which, together with phonological awareness, is highly predictive of pre‐school children's reading acquisition, derives from children's knowledge of their associated letter names and the phonological patterns of those names. In this study of 66 monolingual pre‐school children we examined whether phonological patterns between letter names and their associated sounds might be differentially associated with aspects of phonological awareness. Results suggest that rudimentary levels of phonological awareness may facilitate the learning of letter sound associations. However, more explicit phonological awareness appears to be linked bi‐directionally with letter sound knowledge with diverse name‐sound associations, with letter sound associations that do not follow regular patterns (e.g. ‘juh’ for ‘j’ and ‘huh’ for ‘h’) most closely associated with performance in more complex phoneme awareness tasks.     

Learning New Words Affects Nonword Pronunciation in Children

In two experiments we examined how children's nonword pronunciations are influenced by learning words. In Experiment 1, children pronounced nonwords before and after learning words sharing orthographic rimes with the nonwords. These rimes varied in spelling-to-sound consistency and regularity. Children's nonword pronunciations were more sensitive to consistency and regularity after instruction than before. Experiment 2 expanded upon Experiment 1 by modifying the instruction to highlight regularity and consistency in rime unit neighborhoods and by including both younger (M age = 7.6) and older (M age = 9.92) participants. After instruction, Experiment 2 participants demonstrated greater sensitivity to rime unit consistency and regularity than Experiment 1 participants. In both experiments, the children, especially the younger participants, made more adultlike pronunciations after instruction than before. We conclude that learning words varying in consistency and regularity increased the children's sensitivity to these properties.     

An investigation of Grade 5 children's knowledge of the doubling rule in spelling

The goal of this study was to investigate Grade 5 children's knowledge of a common word pattern in English, to double the final consonant of a one‐syllable word when adding –ed. Significant correlations were found between –ed spelling and general spelling ability, as well as correct pronunciation of –ed words in isolated word reading and spelling. The correlation between –ed spelling and –ed word reading (r=0.31) is lower than one would expect to find in general spelling and reading ability. Individual interviews were conducted to assess children's explicit awareness of the doubling rule, followed by a measure of consistency in spelling a selected number of –ed words. Performance on an artificial grammar task indicated a correlation between implicit learning of nonsense letter strings and spelling ability. Overall results point to the unstable nature of children's knowledge of the doubling rule. Implications for instruction are discussed.     

Beyond phonological skills: broader language skills contribute to the development of reading

This paper reports a study that followed the development of reading skills in 72 children from the age of 8.5 to 13 years. Each child was administered tests of reading, oral language, phonological skills and nonverbal ability at time 1 and their performance on tests of reading comprehension, word recognition, nonword decoding and exception word reading was assessed at time 2. In addition to phonological skills, three measures of non‐phonological oral language tapping vocabulary knowledge and listening comprehension were unique concurrent predictors of both reading comprehension and word recognition at time 1. Importantly, all three measures of oral language skill also contributed unique variance to individual differences in reading comprehension, word recognition and exception word reading four and a half years later, even when the autoregressive effects of early reading skill were controlled. Moreover, the extent to which a child's word recognition departed from the level predicted from their decoding ability correlated with their oral language skills. These findings suggest that children's oral language proficiency, as well as their phonological skills, influences the course of reading development.